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BY JEMMA FOSTER
When we engage with the more-than-human our neurophysiology changes and we activate a primal sense of awe, that has been proven to increase pro social and creative behaviours. When we allow ourselves to inhabit alternative perspectives, we can open up new pathways and possibilities for designing a future that reaches beyond our perceived limitations.
In many past and present cultures, knowing is through becoming and sensing through direct perception. Plants communicate with humans through dreams and altered states of consciousness. They occupy the liminal spaces where precognition, intuition and insight lie.
When anthropologists ask indigenous groups how they know which plants treat which diseases, the reply is never trial and error, they all say the same thing: the plants told us.
The Aymara people of the Andes see the past as being in front of them, with their backs to the future. As we stand here in the present day, the path of the past is etched into the landscape with all the actions and experiences of our human and more-than-human ancestors that have led us to where we are now. These tracks are our signposts, our breadcrumbs to help us find our way.
By engaging with the wisdom and practices of our human and non-human ancestors, we look towards our past in order to inform our future and establish a framework for reclaiming a sacred relationship to nature and, in doing so, to ourselves.
Considering plants and other life forms as passive and lacking agency, and nature as separate from ourselves has facilitated our abuse of the natural world, and has ultimately been an act of self harm.
Our journey towards co-creative partnership with nature begins with diffusing the myth of separation. With recognition, reconciliation and respect, as we transition from isolation to collaboration, ownership to stewardship, resource to relationship.
The Müller-Lyer illusion is one that only people from modern, industrialised cultures with our systems and structures of lines and boxes, fall for. Whereas non-industrialised, rural groups see the truth: that the lines are equal in length. What other blind spots have we created because of our environmental and social conditioning? What are we not seeing because we are looking the wrong way?
Homo Sapiens have been around for 300, 000 years - modern homo sapiens just half of that. The horsetail plant has been around for 350 million years. Why would we assume that these ancient beings have no wisdom to offer? Might these masters of adaptation and survival know someone we don’t. What innovations and solutions might emerge if plants, which make up to 87% of life on the planet, were on our advisory board?
Bodies of nature around the world are being granted personhood. In 2021, Ecuador set a precedent as the first country to recognise the Rights of Nature as equal to people, and the following year, UK company Faith in Nature, became the first company to put nature on their board as a director and legal entity, giving nature equal voting rights. More companies are following the trend.
These are crucial first steps, but how can we effectively listen and what are we listening to?
Pioneers in the field of plant neurobiology, are looking deeper into plant intelligence, plant communication and social behaviour.
Studies have shown us that plants can see, hear, taste, touch - all without the sensory organs of perception we associate with these functions. They've also demonstrated that plants can learn, remember and problem solve.
They can perceive self and non-self, recognise and favour their kin. They can manipulate and pretend to be something they’re not. They can make unique, individual choices.
Plants are strategists. They exist on such a timeline that they are unable to react to a situation as animals and humans do: they can't just run away. Instead, they have to be particularly creative about finding solutions for survival that ensure long term evolutionary security.
If we consider plants as sentient, what then about consciousness? How can we talk about plant consciousness when we don't agree on what human consciousness is?
How anaesthetic works has been a medical mystery since its introduction to the operating theatre in 1847. Recent studies suggest that it prevents the nervous system from effectively signalling to the brain by disrupting how parts of the brain communicate, but there is still little consensus on how this is actioned.
We know that general anaesthetic switches off consciousness in humans and animals, even if there is little consensus on how this is actioned. Last year, botanist Stefano Mancuso's team began experimenting with modern anaesthetic drugs and found that plants respond in the same way as humans - becoming completely unresponsive to external stimuli, despite lacking brains and a nervous system.
Although there is growing evidence of more-than-human intelligence, brain chauvinism is still strong. We talk about being brain dead as a vegetative state. But a brain is just one example of a processing network.
Recent studies suggest that plant root systems, with tens of millions of root tips, contain brain-like entities called meristems acting as a supercomputer.
which are made up of tens of millions of root tips, suggest they may act like a super computer with brain-like entities called meristems involved in complex molecular and electrical signalling that transmit information. Plants also use glutamate and glycine in their signalling process, which are the primary neurotransmitters found in mammalian brains like ours.
Plants have a complex chemical language employing thousands of volatile compounds that they cook up in their internal laboratories to respond to environmental stressors, and exchange information with their kin and other species.
But they are also able to create sound. Tiny ultrasonic clicks are produced when water moving within a plant creates air bubbles.
Using laser doppler vibrometers we can measure micro vibrations in plants that produce ultrasonic clicking sounds during cavitation, which is when water moving within a plant creates air bubbles.
Ecologist Heidi Appel experimented with cabbage plants which generate and release a mustard oil to deter white cabbage caterpillars. She found that the plants released the oil when in response to just hearing the sound of the caterpillars chewing being played to them. They were also able to differentiate between genuine predators and other species with similar vibratory patterns.
Human hearing is within a narrow range of 20Hz to 20KHz compared to animal extend to frequencies far higher, expressed through infrasound, and with delivery speeds only captured through digital data.
Machine learning is allowing us to understand the signalling languages of animals elephants, birds, bats and the phonetic alphabets of dolphins and whales, but meaning making does not require the language of the more-than-than-human to conform to human linguistics, to be decoded and deciphered, but instead we can learn how to communicate in other sensual, embodied ways.
Composer Pauline Oliveros describes the practice of deep listening as listening as feeling, beyond the ears - the whole body itself is an organ of sense. This is listening through a more-than-human lens: It is what anthropologist Eduardo Kohn describes in How Forests Think as primal sensing. It is listening with images and allows us to receive information directly before it is filtered through our conditioned, thinking mind.
And this is where a large part of my research is, in direct perception and nonlinear, non-verbal communication using sound as a medium. I make field recordings - using contact mics, hydrophones, sensors and transducers to record sounds from the places that our human ears don’t often reach. I also use biodata devices to measure micro-fluctuations in electroconductivity of plants and fungi in response to environmental stimuli which can be converted into sound.
In indigenous Amazonian cultures, plants have their own unique song that expresses itself as a visual tapestry. Huito is a person-plant composition created with a sound artist called Imka using field and biodata recordings measuring the electric conductivity in plants that I took in the Amazon. Tikuna elder and linguist Abel Santos, narrates the Tikuna cosmology of our plant origins, where humans were born from the Huito fruit (Genipa Americana).
And this relationship is reflected in how they name the parts of a plant as parts of the human body. A plant has arms, legs, a belly and a heart.
Witnessing these sonic landscapes, reveals layers and textures otherwise inaudible, a polyphonic symphony that anthropologist Anna Tsing call multispecies assemblages or, interspecies gatherings. She invites us to pick out the separate, simultaneous melodies and listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance they create, and witness the value of diversity and interspecies mingling more-than-human world building.
Plants are conductors of what anthropologist Anna Tsing describes as the polyphonic symphony created by interspecies gatherings. They are in communication with every aspect of their environment above and below ground, and there is a whole chorus happening beneath our feet. But it doesn’t sing like it used to.
1 tsp of soil contains more living organisms than there are people on the planet. A report published in 2022 by the United Nations estimates that 90% of soils worldwide will be moderately to severely degraded by 2050 if we continue on our current trajectory. At the moment that figure is already 40%. In neighbouring Norway the Global Seed vault preserves the genetic heritage of plants, but these will be redundant in a future without soil.
The expansion of agro-industrial technologies and new forms of colonialism represented by GM and monoculture crops, genetic extractivism, seed privatisation, industrial fertilisers and agricultural chemicals, are all disruptors to the biochemical language of the soil and the ability for microbes, fungi, plants, and animals to communicate, relate, respond, and adapt.
“A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening.” - Bernie Kraus, 2012
When we engage with the more-than-human our neurophysiology changes and we activate a primal sense of awe, that has been proven to increase pro social and creative behaviours. When we allow ourselves to inhabit alternative perspectives, we can open up new pathways and possibilities for designing a future that reaches beyond our perceived limitations.
In many past and present cultures, knowing is through becoming and sensing through direct perception. Plants communicate with humans through dreams and altered states of consciousness. They occupy the liminal spaces where precognition, intuition and insight lie.
When anthropologists ask indigenous groups how they know which plants treat which diseases, the reply is never trial and error, they all say the same thing: the plants told us.
The Aymara people of the Andes see the past as being in front of them, with their backs to the future. As we stand here in the present day, the path of the past is etched into the landscape with all the actions and experiences of our human and more-than-human ancestors that have led us to where we are now. These tracks are our signposts, our breadcrumbs to help us find our way.
By engaging with the wisdom and practices of our human and non-human ancestors, we look towards our past in order to inform our future and establish a framework for reclaiming a sacred relationship to nature and, in doing so, to ourselves.
Considering plants and other life forms as passive and lacking agency, and nature as separate from ourselves has facilitated our abuse of the natural world, and has ultimately been an act of self harm.
Our journey towards co-creative partnership with nature begins with diffusing the myth of separation. With recognition, reconciliation and respect, as we transition from isolation to collaboration, ownership to stewardship, resource to relationship.
The Müller-Lyer illusion is one that only people from modern, industrialised cultures with our systems and structures of lines and boxes, fall for. Whereas non-industrialised, rural groups see the truth: that the lines are equal in length. What other blind spots have we created because of our environmental and social conditioning? What are we not seeing because we are looking the wrong way?
Homo Sapiens have been around for 300, 000 years - modern homo sapiens just half of that. The horsetail plant has been around for 350 million years. Why would we assume that these ancient beings have no wisdom to offer? Might these masters of adaptation and survival know someone we don’t. What innovations and solutions might emerge if plants, which make up to 87% of life on the planet, were on our advisory board?
Bodies of nature around the world are being granted personhood. In 2021, Ecuador set a precedent as the first country to recognise the Rights of Nature as equal to people, and the following year, UK company Faith in Nature, became the first company to put nature on their board as a director and legal entity, giving nature equal voting rights. More companies are following the trend.
These are crucial first steps, but how can we effectively listen and what are we listening to?
Pioneers in the field of plant neurobiology, are looking deeper into plant intelligence, plant communication and social behaviour.
Studies have shown us that plants can see, hear, taste, touch - all without the sensory organs of perception we associate with these functions. They've also demonstrated that plants can learn, remember and problem solve.
They can perceive self and non-self, recognise and favour their kin. They can manipulate and pretend to be something they’re not. They can make unique, individual choices.
Plants are strategists. They exist on such a timeline that they are unable to react to a situation as animals and humans do: they can't just run away. Instead, they have to be particularly creative about finding solutions for survival that ensure long term evolutionary security.
If we consider plants as sentient, what then about consciousness? How can we talk about plant consciousness when we don't agree on what human consciousness is?
How anaesthetic works has been a medical mystery since its introduction to the operating theatre in 1847. Recent studies suggest that it prevents the nervous system from effectively signalling to the brain by disrupting how parts of the brain communicate, but there is still little consensus on how this is actioned.
We know that general anaesthetic switches off consciousness in humans and animals, even if there is little consensus on how this is actioned. Last year, botanist Stefano Mancuso's team began experimenting with modern anaesthetic drugs and found that plants respond in the same way as humans - becoming completely unresponsive to external stimuli, despite lacking brains and a nervous system.
Although there is growing evidence of more-than-human intelligence, brain chauvinism is still strong. We talk about being brain dead as a vegetative state. But a brain is just one example of a processing network.
Recent studies suggest that plant root systems, with tens of millions of root tips, contain brain-like entities called meristems acting as a supercomputer.
which are made up of tens of millions of root tips, suggest they may act like a super computer with brain-like entities called meristems involved in complex molecular and electrical signalling that transmit information. Plants also use glutamate and glycine in their signalling process, which are the primary neurotransmitters found in mammalian brains like ours.
Plants have a complex chemical language employing thousands of volatile compounds that they cook up in their internal laboratories to respond to environmental stressors, and exchange information with their kin and other species.
But they are also able to create sound. Tiny ultrasonic clicks are produced when water moving within a plant creates air bubbles.
Using laser doppler vibrometers we can measure micro vibrations in plants that produce ultrasonic clicking sounds during cavitation, which is when water moving within a plant creates air bubbles.
Ecologist Heidi Appel experimented with cabbage plants which generate and release a mustard oil to deter white cabbage caterpillars. She found that the plants released the oil when in response to just hearing the sound of the caterpillars chewing being played to them. They were also able to differentiate between genuine predators and other species with similar vibratory patterns.
Human hearing is within a narrow range of 20Hz to 20KHz compared to animal extend to frequencies far higher, expressed through infrasound, and with delivery speeds only captured through digital data.
Machine learning is allowing us to understand the signalling languages of animals elephants, birds, bats and the phonetic alphabets of dolphins and whales, but meaning making does not require the language of the more-than-than-human to conform to human linguistics, to be decoded and deciphered, but instead we can learn how to communicate in other sensual, embodied ways.
Composer Pauline Oliveros describes the practice of deep listening as listening as feeling, beyond the ears - the whole body itself is an organ of sense. This is listening through a more-than-human lens: It is what anthropologist Eduardo Kohn describes in How Forests Think as primal sensing. It is listening with images and allows us to receive information directly before it is filtered through our conditioned, thinking mind.
And this is where a large part of my research is, in direct perception and nonlinear, non-verbal communication using sound as a medium. I make field recordings - using contact mics, hydrophones, sensors and transducers to record sounds from the places that our human ears don’t often reach. I also use biodata devices to measure micro-fluctuations in electroconductivity of plants and fungi in response to environmental stimuli which can be converted into sound.
In indigenous Amazonian cultures, plants have their own unique song that expresses itself as a visual tapestry. Huito is a person-plant composition created with a sound artist called Imka using field and biodata recordings measuring the electric conductivity in plants that I took in the Amazon. Tikuna elder and linguist Abel Santos, narrates the Tikuna cosmology of our plant origins, where humans were born from the Huito fruit (Genipa Americana).
And this relationship is reflected in how they name the parts of a plant as parts of the human body. A plant has arms, legs, a belly and a heart.
Witnessing these sonic landscapes, reveals layers and textures otherwise inaudible, a polyphonic symphony that anthropologist Anna Tsing call multispecies assemblages or, interspecies gatherings. She invites us to pick out the separate, simultaneous melodies and listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance they create, and witness the value of diversity and interspecies mingling more-than-human world building.
Plants are conductors of what anthropologist Anna Tsing describes as the polyphonic symphony created by interspecies gatherings. They are in communication with every aspect of their environment above and below ground, and there is a whole chorus happening beneath our feet. But it doesn’t sing like it used to.
1 tsp of soil contains more living organisms than there are people on the planet. A report published in 2022 by the United Nations estimates that 90% of soils worldwide will be moderately to severely degraded by 2050 if we continue on our current trajectory. At the moment that figure is already 40%. In neighbouring Norway the Global Seed vault preserves the genetic heritage of plants, but these will be redundant in a future without soil.
The expansion of agro-industrial technologies and new forms of colonialism represented by GM and monoculture crops, genetic extractivism, seed privatisation, industrial fertilisers and agricultural chemicals, are all disruptors to the biochemical language of the soil and the ability for microbes, fungi, plants, and animals to communicate, relate, respond, and adapt.
“A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening.” - Bernie Kraus, 2012
Jemma Foster is a creative director, curator, writer, artist and founder of Wild Alchemy Lab, Mama Xanadu and Semantica.
BY JEMMA FOSTER
When we engage with the more-than-human our neurophysiology changes and we activate a primal sense of awe, that has been proven to increase pro social and creative behaviours. When we allow ourselves to inhabit alternative perspectives, we can open up new pathways and possibilities for designing a future that reaches beyond our perceived limitations.
In many past and present cultures, knowing is through becoming and sensing through direct perception. Plants communicate with humans through dreams and altered states of consciousness. They occupy the liminal spaces where precognition, intuition and insight lie.
When anthropologists ask indigenous groups how they know which plants treat which diseases, the reply is never trial and error, they all say the same thing: the plants told us.
The Aymara people of the Andes see the past as being in front of them, with their backs to the future. As we stand here in the present day, the path of the past is etched into the landscape with all the actions and experiences of our human and more-than-human ancestors that have led us to where we are now. These tracks are our signposts, our breadcrumbs to help us find our way.
By engaging with the wisdom and practices of our human and non-human ancestors, we look towards our past in order to inform our future and establish a framework for reclaiming a sacred relationship to nature and, in doing so, to ourselves.
Considering plants and other life forms as passive and lacking agency, and nature as separate from ourselves has facilitated our abuse of the natural world, and has ultimately been an act of self harm.
Our journey towards co-creative partnership with nature begins with diffusing the myth of separation. With recognition, reconciliation and respect, as we transition from isolation to collaboration, ownership to stewardship, resource to relationship.
The Müller-Lyer illusion is one that only people from modern, industrialised cultures with our systems and structures of lines and boxes, fall for. Whereas non-industrialised, rural groups see the truth: that the lines are equal in length. What other blind spots have we created because of our environmental and social conditioning? What are we not seeing because we are looking the wrong way?
Homo Sapiens have been around for 300, 000 years - modern homo sapiens just half of that. The horsetail plant has been around for 350 million years. Why would we assume that these ancient beings have no wisdom to offer? Might these masters of adaptation and survival know someone we don’t. What innovations and solutions might emerge if plants, which make up to 87% of life on the planet, were on our advisory board?
Bodies of nature around the world are being granted personhood. In 2021, Ecuador set a precedent as the first country to recognise the Rights of Nature as equal to people, and the following year, UK company Faith in Nature, became the first company to put nature on their board as a director and legal entity, giving nature equal voting rights. More companies are following the trend.
These are crucial first steps, but how can we effectively listen and what are we listening to?
Pioneers in the field of plant neurobiology, are looking deeper into plant intelligence, plant communication and social behaviour.
Studies have shown us that plants can see, hear, taste, touch - all without the sensory organs of perception we associate with these functions. They've also demonstrated that plants can learn, remember and problem solve.
They can perceive self and non-self, recognise and favour their kin. They can manipulate and pretend to be something they’re not. They can make unique, individual choices.
Plants are strategists. They exist on such a timeline that they are unable to react to a situation as animals and humans do: they can't just run away. Instead, they have to be particularly creative about finding solutions for survival that ensure long term evolutionary security.
If we consider plants as sentient, what then about consciousness? How can we talk about plant consciousness when we don't agree on what human consciousness is?
How anaesthetic works has been a medical mystery since its introduction to the operating theatre in 1847. Recent studies suggest that it prevents the nervous system from effectively signalling to the brain by disrupting how parts of the brain communicate, but there is still little consensus on how this is actioned.
We know that general anaesthetic switches off consciousness in humans and animals, even if there is little consensus on how this is actioned. Last year, botanist Stefano Mancuso's team began experimenting with modern anaesthetic drugs and found that plants respond in the same way as humans - becoming completely unresponsive to external stimuli, despite lacking brains and a nervous system.
Although there is growing evidence of more-than-human intelligence, brain chauvinism is still strong. We talk about being brain dead as a vegetative state. But a brain is just one example of a processing network.
Recent studies suggest that plant root systems, with tens of millions of root tips, contain brain-like entities called meristems acting as a supercomputer.
which are made up of tens of millions of root tips, suggest they may act like a super computer with brain-like entities called meristems involved in complex molecular and electrical signalling that transmit information. Plants also use glutamate and glycine in their signalling process, which are the primary neurotransmitters found in mammalian brains like ours.
Plants have a complex chemical language employing thousands of volatile compounds that they cook up in their internal laboratories to respond to environmental stressors, and exchange information with their kin and other species.
But they are also able to create sound. Tiny ultrasonic clicks are produced when water moving within a plant creates air bubbles.
Using laser doppler vibrometers we can measure micro vibrations in plants that produce ultrasonic clicking sounds during cavitation, which is when water moving within a plant creates air bubbles.
Ecologist Heidi Appel experimented with cabbage plants which generate and release a mustard oil to deter white cabbage caterpillars. She found that the plants released the oil when in response to just hearing the sound of the caterpillars chewing being played to them. They were also able to differentiate between genuine predators and other species with similar vibratory patterns.
Human hearing is within a narrow range of 20Hz to 20KHz compared to animal extend to frequencies far higher, expressed through infrasound, and with delivery speeds only captured through digital data.
Machine learning is allowing us to understand the signalling languages of animals elephants, birds, bats and the phonetic alphabets of dolphins and whales, but meaning making does not require the language of the more-than-than-human to conform to human linguistics, to be decoded and deciphered, but instead we can learn how to communicate in other sensual, embodied ways.
Composer Pauline Oliveros describes the practice of deep listening as listening as feeling, beyond the ears - the whole body itself is an organ of sense. This is listening through a more-than-human lens: It is what anthropologist Eduardo Kohn describes in How Forests Think as primal sensing. It is listening with images and allows us to receive information directly before it is filtered through our conditioned, thinking mind.
And this is where a large part of my research is, in direct perception and nonlinear, non-verbal communication using sound as a medium. I make field recordings - using contact mics, hydrophones, sensors and transducers to record sounds from the places that our human ears don’t often reach. I also use biodata devices to measure micro-fluctuations in electroconductivity of plants and fungi in response to environmental stimuli which can be converted into sound.
In indigenous Amazonian cultures, plants have their own unique song that expresses itself as a visual tapestry. Huito is a person-plant composition created with a sound artist called Imka using field and biodata recordings measuring the electric conductivity in plants that I took in the Amazon. Tikuna elder and linguist Abel Santos, narrates the Tikuna cosmology of our plant origins, where humans were born from the Huito fruit (Genipa Americana).
And this relationship is reflected in how they name the parts of a plant as parts of the human body. A plant has arms, legs, a belly and a heart.
Witnessing these sonic landscapes, reveals layers and textures otherwise inaudible, a polyphonic symphony that anthropologist Anna Tsing call multispecies assemblages or, interspecies gatherings. She invites us to pick out the separate, simultaneous melodies and listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance they create, and witness the value of diversity and interspecies mingling more-than-human world building.
Plants are conductors of what anthropologist Anna Tsing describes as the polyphonic symphony created by interspecies gatherings. They are in communication with every aspect of their environment above and below ground, and there is a whole chorus happening beneath our feet. But it doesn’t sing like it used to.
1 tsp of soil contains more living organisms than there are people on the planet. A report published in 2022 by the United Nations estimates that 90% of soils worldwide will be moderately to severely degraded by 2050 if we continue on our current trajectory. At the moment that figure is already 40%. In neighbouring Norway the Global Seed vault preserves the genetic heritage of plants, but these will be redundant in a future without soil.
The expansion of agro-industrial technologies and new forms of colonialism represented by GM and monoculture crops, genetic extractivism, seed privatisation, industrial fertilisers and agricultural chemicals, are all disruptors to the biochemical language of the soil and the ability for microbes, fungi, plants, and animals to communicate, relate, respond, and adapt.
“A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening.” - Bernie Kraus, 2012
When we engage with the more-than-human our neurophysiology changes and we activate a primal sense of awe, that has been proven to increase pro social and creative behaviours. When we allow ourselves to inhabit alternative perspectives, we can open up new pathways and possibilities for designing a future that reaches beyond our perceived limitations.
In many past and present cultures, knowing is through becoming and sensing through direct perception. Plants communicate with humans through dreams and altered states of consciousness. They occupy the liminal spaces where precognition, intuition and insight lie.
When anthropologists ask indigenous groups how they know which plants treat which diseases, the reply is never trial and error, they all say the same thing: the plants told us.
The Aymara people of the Andes see the past as being in front of them, with their backs to the future. As we stand here in the present day, the path of the past is etched into the landscape with all the actions and experiences of our human and more-than-human ancestors that have led us to where we are now. These tracks are our signposts, our breadcrumbs to help us find our way.
By engaging with the wisdom and practices of our human and non-human ancestors, we look towards our past in order to inform our future and establish a framework for reclaiming a sacred relationship to nature and, in doing so, to ourselves.
Considering plants and other life forms as passive and lacking agency, and nature as separate from ourselves has facilitated our abuse of the natural world, and has ultimately been an act of self harm.
Our journey towards co-creative partnership with nature begins with diffusing the myth of separation. With recognition, reconciliation and respect, as we transition from isolation to collaboration, ownership to stewardship, resource to relationship.
The Müller-Lyer illusion is one that only people from modern, industrialised cultures with our systems and structures of lines and boxes, fall for. Whereas non-industrialised, rural groups see the truth: that the lines are equal in length. What other blind spots have we created because of our environmental and social conditioning? What are we not seeing because we are looking the wrong way?
Homo Sapiens have been around for 300, 000 years - modern homo sapiens just half of that. The horsetail plant has been around for 350 million years. Why would we assume that these ancient beings have no wisdom to offer? Might these masters of adaptation and survival know someone we don’t. What innovations and solutions might emerge if plants, which make up to 87% of life on the planet, were on our advisory board?
Bodies of nature around the world are being granted personhood. In 2021, Ecuador set a precedent as the first country to recognise the Rights of Nature as equal to people, and the following year, UK company Faith in Nature, became the first company to put nature on their board as a director and legal entity, giving nature equal voting rights. More companies are following the trend.
These are crucial first steps, but how can we effectively listen and what are we listening to?
Pioneers in the field of plant neurobiology, are looking deeper into plant intelligence, plant communication and social behaviour.
Studies have shown us that plants can see, hear, taste, touch - all without the sensory organs of perception we associate with these functions. They've also demonstrated that plants can learn, remember and problem solve.
They can perceive self and non-self, recognise and favour their kin. They can manipulate and pretend to be something they’re not. They can make unique, individual choices.
Plants are strategists. They exist on such a timeline that they are unable to react to a situation as animals and humans do: they can't just run away. Instead, they have to be particularly creative about finding solutions for survival that ensure long term evolutionary security.
If we consider plants as sentient, what then about consciousness? How can we talk about plant consciousness when we don't agree on what human consciousness is?
How anaesthetic works has been a medical mystery since its introduction to the operating theatre in 1847. Recent studies suggest that it prevents the nervous system from effectively signalling to the brain by disrupting how parts of the brain communicate, but there is still little consensus on how this is actioned.
We know that general anaesthetic switches off consciousness in humans and animals, even if there is little consensus on how this is actioned. Last year, botanist Stefano Mancuso's team began experimenting with modern anaesthetic drugs and found that plants respond in the same way as humans - becoming completely unresponsive to external stimuli, despite lacking brains and a nervous system.
Although there is growing evidence of more-than-human intelligence, brain chauvinism is still strong. We talk about being brain dead as a vegetative state. But a brain is just one example of a processing network.
Recent studies suggest that plant root systems, with tens of millions of root tips, contain brain-like entities called meristems acting as a supercomputer.
which are made up of tens of millions of root tips, suggest they may act like a super computer with brain-like entities called meristems involved in complex molecular and electrical signalling that transmit information. Plants also use glutamate and glycine in their signalling process, which are the primary neurotransmitters found in mammalian brains like ours.
Plants have a complex chemical language employing thousands of volatile compounds that they cook up in their internal laboratories to respond to environmental stressors, and exchange information with their kin and other species.
But they are also able to create sound. Tiny ultrasonic clicks are produced when water moving within a plant creates air bubbles.
Using laser doppler vibrometers we can measure micro vibrations in plants that produce ultrasonic clicking sounds during cavitation, which is when water moving within a plant creates air bubbles.
Ecologist Heidi Appel experimented with cabbage plants which generate and release a mustard oil to deter white cabbage caterpillars. She found that the plants released the oil when in response to just hearing the sound of the caterpillars chewing being played to them. They were also able to differentiate between genuine predators and other species with similar vibratory patterns.
Human hearing is within a narrow range of 20Hz to 20KHz compared to animal extend to frequencies far higher, expressed through infrasound, and with delivery speeds only captured through digital data.
Machine learning is allowing us to understand the signalling languages of animals elephants, birds, bats and the phonetic alphabets of dolphins and whales, but meaning making does not require the language of the more-than-than-human to conform to human linguistics, to be decoded and deciphered, but instead we can learn how to communicate in other sensual, embodied ways.
Composer Pauline Oliveros describes the practice of deep listening as listening as feeling, beyond the ears - the whole body itself is an organ of sense. This is listening through a more-than-human lens: It is what anthropologist Eduardo Kohn describes in How Forests Think as primal sensing. It is listening with images and allows us to receive information directly before it is filtered through our conditioned, thinking mind.
And this is where a large part of my research is, in direct perception and nonlinear, non-verbal communication using sound as a medium. I make field recordings - using contact mics, hydrophones, sensors and transducers to record sounds from the places that our human ears don’t often reach. I also use biodata devices to measure micro-fluctuations in electroconductivity of plants and fungi in response to environmental stimuli which can be converted into sound.
In indigenous Amazonian cultures, plants have their own unique song that expresses itself as a visual tapestry. Huito is a person-plant composition created with a sound artist called Imka using field and biodata recordings measuring the electric conductivity in plants that I took in the Amazon. Tikuna elder and linguist Abel Santos, narrates the Tikuna cosmology of our plant origins, where humans were born from the Huito fruit (Genipa Americana).
And this relationship is reflected in how they name the parts of a plant as parts of the human body. A plant has arms, legs, a belly and a heart.
Witnessing these sonic landscapes, reveals layers and textures otherwise inaudible, a polyphonic symphony that anthropologist Anna Tsing call multispecies assemblages or, interspecies gatherings. She invites us to pick out the separate, simultaneous melodies and listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance they create, and witness the value of diversity and interspecies mingling more-than-human world building.
Plants are conductors of what anthropologist Anna Tsing describes as the polyphonic symphony created by interspecies gatherings. They are in communication with every aspect of their environment above and below ground, and there is a whole chorus happening beneath our feet. But it doesn’t sing like it used to.
1 tsp of soil contains more living organisms than there are people on the planet. A report published in 2022 by the United Nations estimates that 90% of soils worldwide will be moderately to severely degraded by 2050 if we continue on our current trajectory. At the moment that figure is already 40%. In neighbouring Norway the Global Seed vault preserves the genetic heritage of plants, but these will be redundant in a future without soil.
The expansion of agro-industrial technologies and new forms of colonialism represented by GM and monoculture crops, genetic extractivism, seed privatisation, industrial fertilisers and agricultural chemicals, are all disruptors to the biochemical language of the soil and the ability for microbes, fungi, plants, and animals to communicate, relate, respond, and adapt.
“A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening.” - Bernie Kraus, 2012
Jemma Foster is a creative director, curator, writer, artist and founder of Wild Alchemy Lab, Mama Xanadu and Semantica.
BY JEMMA FOSTER
When we engage with the more-than-human our neurophysiology changes and we activate a primal sense of awe, that has been proven to increase pro social and creative behaviours. When we allow ourselves to inhabit alternative perspectives, we can open up new pathways and possibilities for designing a future that reaches beyond our perceived limitations.
In many past and present cultures, knowing is through becoming and sensing through direct perception. Plants communicate with humans through dreams and altered states of consciousness. They occupy the liminal spaces where precognition, intuition and insight lie.
When anthropologists ask indigenous groups how they know which plants treat which diseases, the reply is never trial and error, they all say the same thing: the plants told us.
The Aymara people of the Andes see the past as being in front of them, with their backs to the future. As we stand here in the present day, the path of the past is etched into the landscape with all the actions and experiences of our human and more-than-human ancestors that have led us to where we are now. These tracks are our signposts, our breadcrumbs to help us find our way.
By engaging with the wisdom and practices of our human and non-human ancestors, we look towards our past in order to inform our future and establish a framework for reclaiming a sacred relationship to nature and, in doing so, to ourselves.
Considering plants and other life forms as passive and lacking agency, and nature as separate from ourselves has facilitated our abuse of the natural world, and has ultimately been an act of self harm.
Our journey towards co-creative partnership with nature begins with diffusing the myth of separation. With recognition, reconciliation and respect, as we transition from isolation to collaboration, ownership to stewardship, resource to relationship.
The Müller-Lyer illusion is one that only people from modern, industrialised cultures with our systems and structures of lines and boxes, fall for. Whereas non-industrialised, rural groups see the truth: that the lines are equal in length. What other blind spots have we created because of our environmental and social conditioning? What are we not seeing because we are looking the wrong way?
Homo Sapiens have been around for 300, 000 years - modern homo sapiens just half of that. The horsetail plant has been around for 350 million years. Why would we assume that these ancient beings have no wisdom to offer? Might these masters of adaptation and survival know someone we don’t. What innovations and solutions might emerge if plants, which make up to 87% of life on the planet, were on our advisory board?
Bodies of nature around the world are being granted personhood. In 2021, Ecuador set a precedent as the first country to recognise the Rights of Nature as equal to people, and the following year, UK company Faith in Nature, became the first company to put nature on their board as a director and legal entity, giving nature equal voting rights. More companies are following the trend.
These are crucial first steps, but how can we effectively listen and what are we listening to?
Pioneers in the field of plant neurobiology, are looking deeper into plant intelligence, plant communication and social behaviour.
Studies have shown us that plants can see, hear, taste, touch - all without the sensory organs of perception we associate with these functions. They've also demonstrated that plants can learn, remember and problem solve.
They can perceive self and non-self, recognise and favour their kin. They can manipulate and pretend to be something they’re not. They can make unique, individual choices.
Plants are strategists. They exist on such a timeline that they are unable to react to a situation as animals and humans do: they can't just run away. Instead, they have to be particularly creative about finding solutions for survival that ensure long term evolutionary security.
If we consider plants as sentient, what then about consciousness? How can we talk about plant consciousness when we don't agree on what human consciousness is?
How anaesthetic works has been a medical mystery since its introduction to the operating theatre in 1847. Recent studies suggest that it prevents the nervous system from effectively signalling to the brain by disrupting how parts of the brain communicate, but there is still little consensus on how this is actioned.
We know that general anaesthetic switches off consciousness in humans and animals, even if there is little consensus on how this is actioned. Last year, botanist Stefano Mancuso's team began experimenting with modern anaesthetic drugs and found that plants respond in the same way as humans - becoming completely unresponsive to external stimuli, despite lacking brains and a nervous system.
Although there is growing evidence of more-than-human intelligence, brain chauvinism is still strong. We talk about being brain dead as a vegetative state. But a brain is just one example of a processing network.
Recent studies suggest that plant root systems, with tens of millions of root tips, contain brain-like entities called meristems acting as a supercomputer.
which are made up of tens of millions of root tips, suggest they may act like a super computer with brain-like entities called meristems involved in complex molecular and electrical signalling that transmit information. Plants also use glutamate and glycine in their signalling process, which are the primary neurotransmitters found in mammalian brains like ours.
Plants have a complex chemical language employing thousands of volatile compounds that they cook up in their internal laboratories to respond to environmental stressors, and exchange information with their kin and other species.
But they are also able to create sound. Tiny ultrasonic clicks are produced when water moving within a plant creates air bubbles.
Using laser doppler vibrometers we can measure micro vibrations in plants that produce ultrasonic clicking sounds during cavitation, which is when water moving within a plant creates air bubbles.
Ecologist Heidi Appel experimented with cabbage plants which generate and release a mustard oil to deter white cabbage caterpillars. She found that the plants released the oil when in response to just hearing the sound of the caterpillars chewing being played to them. They were also able to differentiate between genuine predators and other species with similar vibratory patterns.
Human hearing is within a narrow range of 20Hz to 20KHz compared to animal extend to frequencies far higher, expressed through infrasound, and with delivery speeds only captured through digital data.
Machine learning is allowing us to understand the signalling languages of animals elephants, birds, bats and the phonetic alphabets of dolphins and whales, but meaning making does not require the language of the more-than-than-human to conform to human linguistics, to be decoded and deciphered, but instead we can learn how to communicate in other sensual, embodied ways.
Composer Pauline Oliveros describes the practice of deep listening as listening as feeling, beyond the ears - the whole body itself is an organ of sense. This is listening through a more-than-human lens: It is what anthropologist Eduardo Kohn describes in How Forests Think as primal sensing. It is listening with images and allows us to receive information directly before it is filtered through our conditioned, thinking mind.
And this is where a large part of my research is, in direct perception and nonlinear, non-verbal communication using sound as a medium. I make field recordings - using contact mics, hydrophones, sensors and transducers to record sounds from the places that our human ears don’t often reach. I also use biodata devices to measure micro-fluctuations in electroconductivity of plants and fungi in response to environmental stimuli which can be converted into sound.
In indigenous Amazonian cultures, plants have their own unique song that expresses itself as a visual tapestry. Huito is a person-plant composition created with a sound artist called Imka using field and biodata recordings measuring the electric conductivity in plants that I took in the Amazon. Tikuna elder and linguist Abel Santos, narrates the Tikuna cosmology of our plant origins, where humans were born from the Huito fruit (Genipa Americana).
And this relationship is reflected in how they name the parts of a plant as parts of the human body. A plant has arms, legs, a belly and a heart.
Witnessing these sonic landscapes, reveals layers and textures otherwise inaudible, a polyphonic symphony that anthropologist Anna Tsing call multispecies assemblages or, interspecies gatherings. She invites us to pick out the separate, simultaneous melodies and listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance they create, and witness the value of diversity and interspecies mingling more-than-human world building.
Plants are conductors of what anthropologist Anna Tsing describes as the polyphonic symphony created by interspecies gatherings. They are in communication with every aspect of their environment above and below ground, and there is a whole chorus happening beneath our feet. But it doesn’t sing like it used to.
1 tsp of soil contains more living organisms than there are people on the planet. A report published in 2022 by the United Nations estimates that 90% of soils worldwide will be moderately to severely degraded by 2050 if we continue on our current trajectory. At the moment that figure is already 40%. In neighbouring Norway the Global Seed vault preserves the genetic heritage of plants, but these will be redundant in a future without soil.
The expansion of agro-industrial technologies and new forms of colonialism represented by GM and monoculture crops, genetic extractivism, seed privatisation, industrial fertilisers and agricultural chemicals, are all disruptors to the biochemical language of the soil and the ability for microbes, fungi, plants, and animals to communicate, relate, respond, and adapt.
“A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening.” - Bernie Kraus, 2012
When we engage with the more-than-human our neurophysiology changes and we activate a primal sense of awe, that has been proven to increase pro social and creative behaviours. When we allow ourselves to inhabit alternative perspectives, we can open up new pathways and possibilities for designing a future that reaches beyond our perceived limitations.
In many past and present cultures, knowing is through becoming and sensing through direct perception. Plants communicate with humans through dreams and altered states of consciousness. They occupy the liminal spaces where precognition, intuition and insight lie.
When anthropologists ask indigenous groups how they know which plants treat which diseases, the reply is never trial and error, they all say the same thing: the plants told us.
The Aymara people of the Andes see the past as being in front of them, with their backs to the future. As we stand here in the present day, the path of the past is etched into the landscape with all the actions and experiences of our human and more-than-human ancestors that have led us to where we are now. These tracks are our signposts, our breadcrumbs to help us find our way.
By engaging with the wisdom and practices of our human and non-human ancestors, we look towards our past in order to inform our future and establish a framework for reclaiming a sacred relationship to nature and, in doing so, to ourselves.
Considering plants and other life forms as passive and lacking agency, and nature as separate from ourselves has facilitated our abuse of the natural world, and has ultimately been an act of self harm.
Our journey towards co-creative partnership with nature begins with diffusing the myth of separation. With recognition, reconciliation and respect, as we transition from isolation to collaboration, ownership to stewardship, resource to relationship.
The Müller-Lyer illusion is one that only people from modern, industrialised cultures with our systems and structures of lines and boxes, fall for. Whereas non-industrialised, rural groups see the truth: that the lines are equal in length. What other blind spots have we created because of our environmental and social conditioning? What are we not seeing because we are looking the wrong way?
Homo Sapiens have been around for 300, 000 years - modern homo sapiens just half of that. The horsetail plant has been around for 350 million years. Why would we assume that these ancient beings have no wisdom to offer? Might these masters of adaptation and survival know someone we don’t. What innovations and solutions might emerge if plants, which make up to 87% of life on the planet, were on our advisory board?
Bodies of nature around the world are being granted personhood. In 2021, Ecuador set a precedent as the first country to recognise the Rights of Nature as equal to people, and the following year, UK company Faith in Nature, became the first company to put nature on their board as a director and legal entity, giving nature equal voting rights. More companies are following the trend.
These are crucial first steps, but how can we effectively listen and what are we listening to?
Pioneers in the field of plant neurobiology, are looking deeper into plant intelligence, plant communication and social behaviour.
Studies have shown us that plants can see, hear, taste, touch - all without the sensory organs of perception we associate with these functions. They've also demonstrated that plants can learn, remember and problem solve.
They can perceive self and non-self, recognise and favour their kin. They can manipulate and pretend to be something they’re not. They can make unique, individual choices.
Plants are strategists. They exist on such a timeline that they are unable to react to a situation as animals and humans do: they can't just run away. Instead, they have to be particularly creative about finding solutions for survival that ensure long term evolutionary security.
If we consider plants as sentient, what then about consciousness? How can we talk about plant consciousness when we don't agree on what human consciousness is?
How anaesthetic works has been a medical mystery since its introduction to the operating theatre in 1847. Recent studies suggest that it prevents the nervous system from effectively signalling to the brain by disrupting how parts of the brain communicate, but there is still little consensus on how this is actioned.
We know that general anaesthetic switches off consciousness in humans and animals, even if there is little consensus on how this is actioned. Last year, botanist Stefano Mancuso's team began experimenting with modern anaesthetic drugs and found that plants respond in the same way as humans - becoming completely unresponsive to external stimuli, despite lacking brains and a nervous system.
Although there is growing evidence of more-than-human intelligence, brain chauvinism is still strong. We talk about being brain dead as a vegetative state. But a brain is just one example of a processing network.
Recent studies suggest that plant root systems, with tens of millions of root tips, contain brain-like entities called meristems acting as a supercomputer.
which are made up of tens of millions of root tips, suggest they may act like a super computer with brain-like entities called meristems involved in complex molecular and electrical signalling that transmit information. Plants also use glutamate and glycine in their signalling process, which are the primary neurotransmitters found in mammalian brains like ours.
Plants have a complex chemical language employing thousands of volatile compounds that they cook up in their internal laboratories to respond to environmental stressors, and exchange information with their kin and other species.
But they are also able to create sound. Tiny ultrasonic clicks are produced when water moving within a plant creates air bubbles.
Using laser doppler vibrometers we can measure micro vibrations in plants that produce ultrasonic clicking sounds during cavitation, which is when water moving within a plant creates air bubbles.
Ecologist Heidi Appel experimented with cabbage plants which generate and release a mustard oil to deter white cabbage caterpillars. She found that the plants released the oil when in response to just hearing the sound of the caterpillars chewing being played to them. They were also able to differentiate between genuine predators and other species with similar vibratory patterns.
Human hearing is within a narrow range of 20Hz to 20KHz compared to animal extend to frequencies far higher, expressed through infrasound, and with delivery speeds only captured through digital data.
Machine learning is allowing us to understand the signalling languages of animals elephants, birds, bats and the phonetic alphabets of dolphins and whales, but meaning making does not require the language of the more-than-than-human to conform to human linguistics, to be decoded and deciphered, but instead we can learn how to communicate in other sensual, embodied ways.
Composer Pauline Oliveros describes the practice of deep listening as listening as feeling, beyond the ears - the whole body itself is an organ of sense. This is listening through a more-than-human lens: It is what anthropologist Eduardo Kohn describes in How Forests Think as primal sensing. It is listening with images and allows us to receive information directly before it is filtered through our conditioned, thinking mind.
And this is where a large part of my research is, in direct perception and nonlinear, non-verbal communication using sound as a medium. I make field recordings - using contact mics, hydrophones, sensors and transducers to record sounds from the places that our human ears don’t often reach. I also use biodata devices to measure micro-fluctuations in electroconductivity of plants and fungi in response to environmental stimuli which can be converted into sound.
In indigenous Amazonian cultures, plants have their own unique song that expresses itself as a visual tapestry. Huito is a person-plant composition created with a sound artist called Imka using field and biodata recordings measuring the electric conductivity in plants that I took in the Amazon. Tikuna elder and linguist Abel Santos, narrates the Tikuna cosmology of our plant origins, where humans were born from the Huito fruit (Genipa Americana).
And this relationship is reflected in how they name the parts of a plant as parts of the human body. A plant has arms, legs, a belly and a heart.
Witnessing these sonic landscapes, reveals layers and textures otherwise inaudible, a polyphonic symphony that anthropologist Anna Tsing call multispecies assemblages or, interspecies gatherings. She invites us to pick out the separate, simultaneous melodies and listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance they create, and witness the value of diversity and interspecies mingling more-than-human world building.
Plants are conductors of what anthropologist Anna Tsing describes as the polyphonic symphony created by interspecies gatherings. They are in communication with every aspect of their environment above and below ground, and there is a whole chorus happening beneath our feet. But it doesn’t sing like it used to.
1 tsp of soil contains more living organisms than there are people on the planet. A report published in 2022 by the United Nations estimates that 90% of soils worldwide will be moderately to severely degraded by 2050 if we continue on our current trajectory. At the moment that figure is already 40%. In neighbouring Norway the Global Seed vault preserves the genetic heritage of plants, but these will be redundant in a future without soil.
The expansion of agro-industrial technologies and new forms of colonialism represented by GM and monoculture crops, genetic extractivism, seed privatisation, industrial fertilisers and agricultural chemicals, are all disruptors to the biochemical language of the soil and the ability for microbes, fungi, plants, and animals to communicate, relate, respond, and adapt.
“A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening.” - Bernie Kraus, 2012
Jemma Foster is a creative director, curator, writer, artist and founder of Wild Alchemy Lab, Mama Xanadu and Semantica.
BY JEMMA FOSTER
When we engage with the more-than-human our neurophysiology changes and we activate a primal sense of awe, that has been proven to increase pro social and creative behaviours. When we allow ourselves to inhabit alternative perspectives, we can open up new pathways and possibilities for designing a future that reaches beyond our perceived limitations.
In many past and present cultures, knowing is through becoming and sensing through direct perception. Plants communicate with humans through dreams and altered states of consciousness. They occupy the liminal spaces where precognition, intuition and insight lie.
When anthropologists ask indigenous groups how they know which plants treat which diseases, the reply is never trial and error, they all say the same thing: the plants told us.
The Aymara people of the Andes see the past as being in front of them, with their backs to the future. As we stand here in the present day, the path of the past is etched into the landscape with all the actions and experiences of our human and more-than-human ancestors that have led us to where we are now. These tracks are our signposts, our breadcrumbs to help us find our way.
By engaging with the wisdom and practices of our human and non-human ancestors, we look towards our past in order to inform our future and establish a framework for reclaiming a sacred relationship to nature and, in doing so, to ourselves.
Considering plants and other life forms as passive and lacking agency, and nature as separate from ourselves has facilitated our abuse of the natural world, and has ultimately been an act of self harm.
Our journey towards co-creative partnership with nature begins with diffusing the myth of separation. With recognition, reconciliation and respect, as we transition from isolation to collaboration, ownership to stewardship, resource to relationship.
The Müller-Lyer illusion is one that only people from modern, industrialised cultures with our systems and structures of lines and boxes, fall for. Whereas non-industrialised, rural groups see the truth: that the lines are equal in length. What other blind spots have we created because of our environmental and social conditioning? What are we not seeing because we are looking the wrong way?
Homo Sapiens have been around for 300, 000 years - modern homo sapiens just half of that. The horsetail plant has been around for 350 million years. Why would we assume that these ancient beings have no wisdom to offer? Might these masters of adaptation and survival know someone we don’t. What innovations and solutions might emerge if plants, which make up to 87% of life on the planet, were on our advisory board?
Bodies of nature around the world are being granted personhood. In 2021, Ecuador set a precedent as the first country to recognise the Rights of Nature as equal to people, and the following year, UK company Faith in Nature, became the first company to put nature on their board as a director and legal entity, giving nature equal voting rights. More companies are following the trend.
These are crucial first steps, but how can we effectively listen and what are we listening to?
Pioneers in the field of plant neurobiology, are looking deeper into plant intelligence, plant communication and social behaviour.
Studies have shown us that plants can see, hear, taste, touch - all without the sensory organs of perception we associate with these functions. They've also demonstrated that plants can learn, remember and problem solve.
They can perceive self and non-self, recognise and favour their kin. They can manipulate and pretend to be something they’re not. They can make unique, individual choices.
Plants are strategists. They exist on such a timeline that they are unable to react to a situation as animals and humans do: they can't just run away. Instead, they have to be particularly creative about finding solutions for survival that ensure long term evolutionary security.
If we consider plants as sentient, what then about consciousness? How can we talk about plant consciousness when we don't agree on what human consciousness is?
How anaesthetic works has been a medical mystery since its introduction to the operating theatre in 1847. Recent studies suggest that it prevents the nervous system from effectively signalling to the brain by disrupting how parts of the brain communicate, but there is still little consensus on how this is actioned.
We know that general anaesthetic switches off consciousness in humans and animals, even if there is little consensus on how this is actioned. Last year, botanist Stefano Mancuso's team began experimenting with modern anaesthetic drugs and found that plants respond in the same way as humans - becoming completely unresponsive to external stimuli, despite lacking brains and a nervous system.
Although there is growing evidence of more-than-human intelligence, brain chauvinism is still strong. We talk about being brain dead as a vegetative state. But a brain is just one example of a processing network.
Recent studies suggest that plant root systems, with tens of millions of root tips, contain brain-like entities called meristems acting as a supercomputer.
which are made up of tens of millions of root tips, suggest they may act like a super computer with brain-like entities called meristems involved in complex molecular and electrical signalling that transmit information. Plants also use glutamate and glycine in their signalling process, which are the primary neurotransmitters found in mammalian brains like ours.
Plants have a complex chemical language employing thousands of volatile compounds that they cook up in their internal laboratories to respond to environmental stressors, and exchange information with their kin and other species.
But they are also able to create sound. Tiny ultrasonic clicks are produced when water moving within a plant creates air bubbles.
Using laser doppler vibrometers we can measure micro vibrations in plants that produce ultrasonic clicking sounds during cavitation, which is when water moving within a plant creates air bubbles.
Ecologist Heidi Appel experimented with cabbage plants which generate and release a mustard oil to deter white cabbage caterpillars. She found that the plants released the oil when in response to just hearing the sound of the caterpillars chewing being played to them. They were also able to differentiate between genuine predators and other species with similar vibratory patterns.
Human hearing is within a narrow range of 20Hz to 20KHz compared to animal extend to frequencies far higher, expressed through infrasound, and with delivery speeds only captured through digital data.
Machine learning is allowing us to understand the signalling languages of animals elephants, birds, bats and the phonetic alphabets of dolphins and whales, but meaning making does not require the language of the more-than-than-human to conform to human linguistics, to be decoded and deciphered, but instead we can learn how to communicate in other sensual, embodied ways.
Composer Pauline Oliveros describes the practice of deep listening as listening as feeling, beyond the ears - the whole body itself is an organ of sense. This is listening through a more-than-human lens: It is what anthropologist Eduardo Kohn describes in How Forests Think as primal sensing. It is listening with images and allows us to receive information directly before it is filtered through our conditioned, thinking mind.
And this is where a large part of my research is, in direct perception and nonlinear, non-verbal communication using sound as a medium. I make field recordings - using contact mics, hydrophones, sensors and transducers to record sounds from the places that our human ears don’t often reach. I also use biodata devices to measure micro-fluctuations in electroconductivity of plants and fungi in response to environmental stimuli which can be converted into sound.
In indigenous Amazonian cultures, plants have their own unique song that expresses itself as a visual tapestry. Huito is a person-plant composition created with a sound artist called Imka using field and biodata recordings measuring the electric conductivity in plants that I took in the Amazon. Tikuna elder and linguist Abel Santos, narrates the Tikuna cosmology of our plant origins, where humans were born from the Huito fruit (Genipa Americana).
And this relationship is reflected in how they name the parts of a plant as parts of the human body. A plant has arms, legs, a belly and a heart.
Witnessing these sonic landscapes, reveals layers and textures otherwise inaudible, a polyphonic symphony that anthropologist Anna Tsing call multispecies assemblages or, interspecies gatherings. She invites us to pick out the separate, simultaneous melodies and listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance they create, and witness the value of diversity and interspecies mingling more-than-human world building.
Plants are conductors of what anthropologist Anna Tsing describes as the polyphonic symphony created by interspecies gatherings. They are in communication with every aspect of their environment above and below ground, and there is a whole chorus happening beneath our feet. But it doesn’t sing like it used to.
1 tsp of soil contains more living organisms than there are people on the planet. A report published in 2022 by the United Nations estimates that 90% of soils worldwide will be moderately to severely degraded by 2050 if we continue on our current trajectory. At the moment that figure is already 40%. In neighbouring Norway the Global Seed vault preserves the genetic heritage of plants, but these will be redundant in a future without soil.
The expansion of agro-industrial technologies and new forms of colonialism represented by GM and monoculture crops, genetic extractivism, seed privatisation, industrial fertilisers and agricultural chemicals, are all disruptors to the biochemical language of the soil and the ability for microbes, fungi, plants, and animals to communicate, relate, respond, and adapt.
“A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening.” - Bernie Kraus, 2012
When we engage with the more-than-human our neurophysiology changes and we activate a primal sense of awe, that has been proven to increase pro social and creative behaviours. When we allow ourselves to inhabit alternative perspectives, we can open up new pathways and possibilities for designing a future that reaches beyond our perceived limitations.
In many past and present cultures, knowing is through becoming and sensing through direct perception. Plants communicate with humans through dreams and altered states of consciousness. They occupy the liminal spaces where precognition, intuition and insight lie.
When anthropologists ask indigenous groups how they know which plants treat which diseases, the reply is never trial and error, they all say the same thing: the plants told us.
The Aymara people of the Andes see the past as being in front of them, with their backs to the future. As we stand here in the present day, the path of the past is etched into the landscape with all the actions and experiences of our human and more-than-human ancestors that have led us to where we are now. These tracks are our signposts, our breadcrumbs to help us find our way.
By engaging with the wisdom and practices of our human and non-human ancestors, we look towards our past in order to inform our future and establish a framework for reclaiming a sacred relationship to nature and, in doing so, to ourselves.
Considering plants and other life forms as passive and lacking agency, and nature as separate from ourselves has facilitated our abuse of the natural world, and has ultimately been an act of self harm.
Our journey towards co-creative partnership with nature begins with diffusing the myth of separation. With recognition, reconciliation and respect, as we transition from isolation to collaboration, ownership to stewardship, resource to relationship.
The Müller-Lyer illusion is one that only people from modern, industrialised cultures with our systems and structures of lines and boxes, fall for. Whereas non-industrialised, rural groups see the truth: that the lines are equal in length. What other blind spots have we created because of our environmental and social conditioning? What are we not seeing because we are looking the wrong way?
Homo Sapiens have been around for 300, 000 years - modern homo sapiens just half of that. The horsetail plant has been around for 350 million years. Why would we assume that these ancient beings have no wisdom to offer? Might these masters of adaptation and survival know someone we don’t. What innovations and solutions might emerge if plants, which make up to 87% of life on the planet, were on our advisory board?
Bodies of nature around the world are being granted personhood. In 2021, Ecuador set a precedent as the first country to recognise the Rights of Nature as equal to people, and the following year, UK company Faith in Nature, became the first company to put nature on their board as a director and legal entity, giving nature equal voting rights. More companies are following the trend.
These are crucial first steps, but how can we effectively listen and what are we listening to?
Pioneers in the field of plant neurobiology, are looking deeper into plant intelligence, plant communication and social behaviour.
Studies have shown us that plants can see, hear, taste, touch - all without the sensory organs of perception we associate with these functions. They've also demonstrated that plants can learn, remember and problem solve.
They can perceive self and non-self, recognise and favour their kin. They can manipulate and pretend to be something they’re not. They can make unique, individual choices.
Plants are strategists. They exist on such a timeline that they are unable to react to a situation as animals and humans do: they can't just run away. Instead, they have to be particularly creative about finding solutions for survival that ensure long term evolutionary security.
If we consider plants as sentient, what then about consciousness? How can we talk about plant consciousness when we don't agree on what human consciousness is?
How anaesthetic works has been a medical mystery since its introduction to the operating theatre in 1847. Recent studies suggest that it prevents the nervous system from effectively signalling to the brain by disrupting how parts of the brain communicate, but there is still little consensus on how this is actioned.
We know that general anaesthetic switches off consciousness in humans and animals, even if there is little consensus on how this is actioned. Last year, botanist Stefano Mancuso's team began experimenting with modern anaesthetic drugs and found that plants respond in the same way as humans - becoming completely unresponsive to external stimuli, despite lacking brains and a nervous system.
Although there is growing evidence of more-than-human intelligence, brain chauvinism is still strong. We talk about being brain dead as a vegetative state. But a brain is just one example of a processing network.
Recent studies suggest that plant root systems, with tens of millions of root tips, contain brain-like entities called meristems acting as a supercomputer.
which are made up of tens of millions of root tips, suggest they may act like a super computer with brain-like entities called meristems involved in complex molecular and electrical signalling that transmit information. Plants also use glutamate and glycine in their signalling process, which are the primary neurotransmitters found in mammalian brains like ours.
Plants have a complex chemical language employing thousands of volatile compounds that they cook up in their internal laboratories to respond to environmental stressors, and exchange information with their kin and other species.
But they are also able to create sound. Tiny ultrasonic clicks are produced when water moving within a plant creates air bubbles.
Using laser doppler vibrometers we can measure micro vibrations in plants that produce ultrasonic clicking sounds during cavitation, which is when water moving within a plant creates air bubbles.
Ecologist Heidi Appel experimented with cabbage plants which generate and release a mustard oil to deter white cabbage caterpillars. She found that the plants released the oil when in response to just hearing the sound of the caterpillars chewing being played to them. They were also able to differentiate between genuine predators and other species with similar vibratory patterns.
Human hearing is within a narrow range of 20Hz to 20KHz compared to animal extend to frequencies far higher, expressed through infrasound, and with delivery speeds only captured through digital data.
Machine learning is allowing us to understand the signalling languages of animals elephants, birds, bats and the phonetic alphabets of dolphins and whales, but meaning making does not require the language of the more-than-than-human to conform to human linguistics, to be decoded and deciphered, but instead we can learn how to communicate in other sensual, embodied ways.
Composer Pauline Oliveros describes the practice of deep listening as listening as feeling, beyond the ears - the whole body itself is an organ of sense. This is listening through a more-than-human lens: It is what anthropologist Eduardo Kohn describes in How Forests Think as primal sensing. It is listening with images and allows us to receive information directly before it is filtered through our conditioned, thinking mind.
And this is where a large part of my research is, in direct perception and nonlinear, non-verbal communication using sound as a medium. I make field recordings - using contact mics, hydrophones, sensors and transducers to record sounds from the places that our human ears don’t often reach. I also use biodata devices to measure micro-fluctuations in electroconductivity of plants and fungi in response to environmental stimuli which can be converted into sound.
In indigenous Amazonian cultures, plants have their own unique song that expresses itself as a visual tapestry. Huito is a person-plant composition created with a sound artist called Imka using field and biodata recordings measuring the electric conductivity in plants that I took in the Amazon. Tikuna elder and linguist Abel Santos, narrates the Tikuna cosmology of our plant origins, where humans were born from the Huito fruit (Genipa Americana).
And this relationship is reflected in how they name the parts of a plant as parts of the human body. A plant has arms, legs, a belly and a heart.
Witnessing these sonic landscapes, reveals layers and textures otherwise inaudible, a polyphonic symphony that anthropologist Anna Tsing call multispecies assemblages or, interspecies gatherings. She invites us to pick out the separate, simultaneous melodies and listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance they create, and witness the value of diversity and interspecies mingling more-than-human world building.
Plants are conductors of what anthropologist Anna Tsing describes as the polyphonic symphony created by interspecies gatherings. They are in communication with every aspect of their environment above and below ground, and there is a whole chorus happening beneath our feet. But it doesn’t sing like it used to.
1 tsp of soil contains more living organisms than there are people on the planet. A report published in 2022 by the United Nations estimates that 90% of soils worldwide will be moderately to severely degraded by 2050 if we continue on our current trajectory. At the moment that figure is already 40%. In neighbouring Norway the Global Seed vault preserves the genetic heritage of plants, but these will be redundant in a future without soil.
The expansion of agro-industrial technologies and new forms of colonialism represented by GM and monoculture crops, genetic extractivism, seed privatisation, industrial fertilisers and agricultural chemicals, are all disruptors to the biochemical language of the soil and the ability for microbes, fungi, plants, and animals to communicate, relate, respond, and adapt.
“A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening.” - Bernie Kraus, 2012
Jemma Foster is a creative director, curator, writer, artist and founder of Wild Alchemy Lab, Mama Xanadu and Semantica.